didn't make him
responsible. But'--she leaned down from the plinth with eyes
blazing--'he went scot free. And that girl is at this moment serving her
sentence in Strangeways Gaol.'

Through the moved and murmuring crowd, Jean forced her way, coming in
between Lady John and Stonor, who stood there immovable. The girl
strained to bring her lips near his ear.

'Why do you dislike her so?'

'I?' he said. 'Why should you think----'

'I never saw you look as you did;' with a vaguely frightened air she
added, 'as you do.'

'Men make boast'--the voice came clear from the monument--'that an
English citizen is tried by his peers. What woman is tried by hers?'

'She mistakes the sense in which the word was employed,' said a man who
looked like an Oxford Don.

But there was evidently a sense, larger than that one purely academic,
in which her use of the word could claim its pertinence. The strong
feeling that had seized her as she put the question was sweeping the
crowd along with her.

'A woman is arrested by a man, brought before a man judge, tried by a
jury of men, condemned by men, taken to prison by a man, and by a man
she's hanged! Where in all this were _her_ "peers"? Why did men, when
British justice was born--why did they so long ago insist on trial by "a
jury of their peers"? So that justice shouldn't miscarry--wasn't it? A
man's peers would best understand his circumstances, his temptation, the
degree of his guilt. Yet there's no such unlikeness between different
classes of men as exists between man and woman. What man has the
knowledge that makes him a fit judge of woman's deeds at that time of
anguish--that hour that some woman struggled through to put each man
here into the world. I noticed when a previous speaker quoted the
Labour Party, you applauded. Some of you here, I gather, call yourselves
Labour men. Every woman who has borne a child is a Labour woman. No man
among you can judge what she goes through in her hour of darkness.'

Jean's eyes had dropped from her lover's set white face early in the
recital. But she whispered his name.

He seemed not to hear.

The speaker up there had caught her fluttering breath, and went on so
low that people strained to follow.

'In that great agony, even under the best conditions that money and
devotion can buy, many a woman falls into temporary mania, and not a few
go down to death. In the case of this poor little abandoned working
girl, what man can be the fi